Havana runs on whoever will defy the blockade

Cuba spent the spring living off the kindness of the few governments willing to cross Washington. The Trump administration had effectively cut off the island's oil since January, in what The New York Times called the first real blockade of Cuba since the missile crisis. By early March the lights were going out across the whole country, three times in one month, and President Miguel Diaz-Canel admitted Cuba had not received an oil shipment in three months. The crisis turned foreign policy into a search for fuel.

Russia answered first. A tanker carrying 730,000 barrels of crude reached the Bay of Matanzas at the end of March, Cuba's first crude in three months, enough diesel for barely a week. Moscow promised more, with its foreign ministry calling Cuba its closest friend in the Caribbean and demanding the United States lift the blockade. China filled the rest, approving 80 million dollars in emergency money, solar projects, and 60,000 tons of rice. The first rice reached Havana in late May, and Diaz-Canel thanked Beijing publicly for refusing what he called collective punishment.

The pressure from Washington never let up. The administration designated the military-run conglomerate that controls much of Cuba's economy, then sanctioned eleven regime officials in early May under a new emergency order. Days before this update, federal prosecutors unsealed a murder indictment against Raul Castro for the 1996 shootdown of two exile planes, an echo of the indictment used to justify seizing Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro. Quiet talks did happen, with a Cuban delegation meeting American officials in Havana in April, but Cuba rejected any deal that would push Diaz-Canel out and held to sovereignty as its price.

The rest of Latin America split. Mexico, Spain, and Brazil used a mid-April summit to pledge more humanitarian aid and to call for dialogue under the United Nations charter, a direct rebuke of the cutoff. Germany's chancellor said there was no justification to attack Cuba. Ecuador went the other way, expelling Cuba's ambassador in early March as President Daniel Noboa pulled closer to Washington. Havana ends the window more isolated in its own hemisphere, and more dependent on patrons an ocean away.